It’s worth pointing out that “open documents within an application” includes tabs within a browser [well, Firefox and Opera, at least, I didn't bother loading up IE7].

Why would anyone bother opening up IE7 anyway?

Well, unless they were a web designer, of course.

Nice tip, I knew about the Firefox tab switching but I didn’t know you could switch between documents in another application.

It came up on a FrameMaker mailing list. It’s the kind of thing that’s bugged me for years but I’ve never actually checked to see if there was a solution, just presumed there wasn’t.

Alt is for apps, ctrl is for documents, and shift is for reversing things hence:

alt-tab, ctrl-tab

alt-f4, ctrl-f4

And shift-alt/ctrl-tab/f4 to do it all backwards.

Isn’t this supposed to be over on the left?

I’m just sayin’…

Also worth knowing that the tab pages (‘property pages’) within options boxes work with the Ctrl+Tab combination as if they were sub-application windows. It also moves focus between the ‘parts’ of Windows Explorer windows (and some other single-document apps where Tab has meaning within particular parts).
As izb says, Ctrl+F4 to close a window within an application just as Alt+F4 closes an application-level window, and Shift to reverse Tab orders, but I’m not convinced Shift does anything with the F4 combinations

Surely shift+F4 re-opens the last closed app….